I recall a morning back in the 7th grade, hanging out by the lockers with my friends before class. It must have been a Monday, for we were recapping our weekends. There was not much to talk about really. I’m sure the Hopkinson Twins talked about a wrestling meet they participated in. I talked about playing football with the neighborhood kids. And this one friend, Tom Zlakowski, dropped a whopper on us. He told us that he spent the weekend with his dad, and just as the conversation was about to turn to more pertinent subjects like a debate between which is better, Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2, Tom blurted out, “…and he’s an F.B.I. agent!”
The rest of us gave a collective roll of the eyes, but little Tom Zlakowski persisted. “No, it’s true,” he exclaimed. “I was driving around with him and he got a call on the radio about these drug dealers, and he said, ‘C’mon, let’s go!’”
“What?” one of us said in disbelief.
“He was the closest to the scene.”
“Oh.”
“So we got to the drug dealer’s house and he told me to buckle my seatbelt and put my head down. Then he hit the gas and drove through their living room!! The living room! He got out of the car and went, ‘F.B.I.! Freeze!’ and he arrested them! Isn’t that incredible?”
We all felt, I’m sure, a lot of pity for Tom. I know I did. If his father was even active in Tom’s life, how big of a screw-up would he have to be in order for Tom to come up with a story like that? The three of us did not directly accuse Tom of lying, but we did ask him simple questions regarding the semantics of his Saturday night:
What branch of the F.B.I.?
He couldn’t call for backup?
He couldn’t ring the doorbell?
He couldn’t at least get you out of the car before driving through a goddamn house?
All of these questions were answered by Tom without hesitation, and eventually the three of us let the story slide, even though he never brought in his father’s badge which he promised to show us. My bet was that Tom’s biological father was an alcoholic, and Tom spent the weekend in his one bedroom apartment, picking up empty beer bottles, watching Jenny Jones perhaps, and concocting a story to make his Dad a heroic parent figure by 7:45 Monday morning. A few months later Tom’s mother re-married, and Tom Zlakowski became Tom Sanders, and he moved away, out of our lives forever.
It seemed to me, at the time, understandable that a twelve year old boy would mask the shame of a deadbeat father behind a tall tale like that. But as I grew older, I found that the framework of a young boy’s insecurities and subsequent lies follow him throughout his entire life, only the falsehoods grow more outrageous, outlandish, and shameless as he gets older until eventually, the liar doesn’t even know who he is anymore.
Leroy was a fabricator who personally believed every lie that he told. He was a Cuban immigrant who came to the United States at the age of four and had grown rich and prosperous over 40-some years here, despite working with the rest of us poor saps in the mail-order catalogue warehouse for nearly a decade. His money, he said, didn’t come from his warehouse paychecks, but instead from all the various rich women that he would entice on a regular basis.
“I don’t have to ask them for a thing,” he’d tell us, “They just give me the shit. I don’t take, see. They give.”
We on the night shift didn’t know too much about Leroy. He used to work on the day-shift before coming over to the dark side, and he loathed his six-month stint on the 3:30-midnight shift. All we knew about him was that he was supposedly very suave, very charming. He said he had been given things such as watches, electronics, even a car from one of his girlfriends, although he never drove it to work.
“You ever see how these fuckin’ people park their cars?” he’d begin to say. “No way I’m bringing that car up in here. You crazy?”
It was rumored that he had up to ten children with possibly ten women, but nobody could say for sure. No one met up with him after work for a drink, and he never asked to be seen outside of the warehouse. Everything about Leroy was self-proclaimed: self-proclaimed genius, self-proclaimed financier, self-proclaimed gift to women. All you knew about Leroy was what he told you, and what he told you was bullshit.
He was a very flamboyant middle-aged man. Flamboyant with his hand gestures, his shoulders always moving up and down, his jokes and mannerisms so rehearsed, you would know when exactly he would throw his head back before he laughed and how many times he would stomp his foot as his head rolled forward as he chuckled to himself. In one of the first conversations I had with him, we were discussing the matriarch, the owner, the founder of the catalogue itself, ReginaCarter.
“I met her once,” I told Leroy, trying to be modest, but unable to hide the excitement of the punch line of my anecdote. “At the annual Christmas party, and she…well, she hugged me…in front of everyone. People clapped.”
Leroy didn’t even want to hear the setup, how it came to be that I would be embraced by the mythical woman herself. He just shook his package of crackers at me. (That was a trademark of Leroy’s: he was always eating), shaking his head, giving himself time between swallows.
“Naw, naw,” he’d say. “That’s nothing. She kissed me. All the time. Every Good Friday, when she came in to pass out those coconut-filled chocolate eggs to all the employees, she made sure she got to me first. She’d go, ‘Hi, Leroy!’ And run over and give me a big wet kiss on the cheek.”
“Bullshit,” I told him, not wanting my story of my interaction with the 82 year old Regina Carter to be trumped.
“It’s true,” he said, licking his fingertips and staring down into the cracker package.
“Why in the world would a woman as powerful and sensuous as Regina Carter bother even getting to know your name, let alone give you kiss on the cheek?”
“Huh? What?” he asked, unable to believe that I would question the believability of his polite affair with The Regina. “Ask anyone. Go ahead. Ask anyone on the day shift. They’ll tell you.”
His exaggerated anecdotes at work were at first entertainment to us commoners, how he claimed to be a former pimp beating up on Johns who didn’t pay, or sharing ways to know if the whore was lying about how much money she made. Leroy’s mantra, the thing he seemed to repeat the most at work was, “I’m richer than all y’all motherfuckas in here.”
Leroy was the first and only rich person I ever met who wore a faded Dickies jumpsuit and torn up canvas sneakers.
His mantra was true only to himself and his attitude reflected it. Since he believed that he was “richer than all y’all motherfuckas,” he found no real reason to work. He was only working here for tax purposes, he told us, not for the money. We soon discovered that he was the worst kind of person to work with. He was lazy. I would be standing on a fifteen foot ladder, lugging 40 pound cases up and down the shelves, while he stood there at the bottom of the stairs, consuming empty calories and preservatives he bought from the vending machines.
“Leroy,” I’d say, irritated while I worked and he stood. “You wanna grab a freakin’ box here?”
He would ignore my request and dig his plastic spoon into his microwavable bowl of Vending Machine Chili, spilling some gray meat onto his jumpsuit and proclaim, “I’m richer than all y’all motherfuckas in here!”
Because of his unenthusiastic approach to work, Leroy had pulled a seam in the social fabric between himself and his co-workers. If he had actually worked with us instead of deliberately claiming to be too good for us, we would have listened to his lies and let him believe that we thought they were true, but he didn’t. Say, for instance, he told us he had sex with four women in one night. If he had told us about it while stocking a box or two, we would have let him go on with his story. If his hands were only holding a plastic fork and a can of tuna, we would tell him to shut up and go away. He hardly listened.
Since the rest of the work staff had a combined hatred for Leroy, we were able to discuss him at length behind his back, and in doing so we were able to triangulate his l
ies to find the truth. Every person Leroy encountered at work heard a different variation on the story of his life, and when we brought that to his attention, he’d say they were lying, or they misheard him. Seeing that some of us weren’t buying it, he’d throw his hand up in disappointment at us as he walked away, hoping to find someone who would believe his tales. When the time finally came for him to leave the night shift and go back to working days, there was only one person who could stand to listen to him, to feed his ego. Leroy would follow this guy around, talking in his ear for nearly the entire shift, while the rest of the workers heckled him and called his bluffs. Leroy was happy to go back to the day shift, and we were more than happy to see him go.
The worst—the liar that I think embodies the worst type of person—was Bill, the manager of the restaurant that is adjoined to the golf course. His physical features were disheartening enough, with his Homer Simpson-hairstyle, a widening frame, stunted height, and a graying goatee that must have dated back to the NHL playoffs of 1996 (Go Red Wings!)
Fashion-wise, he presented himself not as a restaurant manager, but more like a defunct junkyard salesman, from his dip-filled lower jaw to his torn black faux-leather sneakers, the original cotton laces replaced by large nylon laces, the kind only fit for boots; the laces too long for the sneakers, the double and triple knots in a rat’s nest over the tongue in order to keep from tripping him.
I’m sure he looked real professional when dealing with customers.
Over the past few years, I was beginning to grow a sense of pride over my ability to read people. Not deep reading, mind you, but enough to know what to avoid. Like the girl with the distant look in her eye, or the inebriated fellow from across the bar who you knew was taking a bad turn with every sip, his scowl and confusion looming over his face; I developed a strong gut feeling for those who were trouble, and I instinctively knew that Bill was simply a scumbag.
I didn’t know the exact depth of Bill’s scumbaggery until I was at the restaurant bar one night. He had been drinking for quite a while at the corner seat of the bar, and he came over and sat next to me while I watched sports highlights on the television above the liquor shelf. With his dip spit cup on his right and glass of vodka tonic on his left, he decided to confide in me.
He kept his eyes focused to the front and said before spitting into his cup, “I’ve killed people, ya know.”
“Ok,” I said, focusing on the game.
“I was an assassin for the United States Government.”
“Where did you do your assassinating?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Ok.”
…
…
…
“But I can tell you that it was in South America in the 1980’s. I was a sniper.”
“You sniped a lot of people?”
“46,” he said slowly, before taking a heavy swig of his drink, trying to add drama to his tortured past. “46 people I have killed. I can still see the looks on their faces right before I killed them.” He said it with reluctance, as if I had pressured him into the conversation in the first place, only I hadn’t. I wanted him back at the other end of the bar, spitting into that disgusting cup all by himself while I watched television from afar.
At this point, it was nearly impossible to contain my frustration with Bill, because while I outwardly kept my composure, inside my head I was screaming, “Oh, my god! You liar! You big, fat bald liar! Oh, my god you’re lying so hard right now!!”
“And why did you stop sniping?”
“Nightmares, man,” he said, shaking his head back and forth, a mannerism I’m sure he’d practiced in the mirror more than once. “Too many nightmares.”
My body was tense with frustration and blatantly calling Bill a big heaping pile of lie wouldn’t help matters. He had too many outs, too many ways to weasel and shirk away from the actual truth. He could easily have said that all of his jobs were covert-ops or that there was no government record of his actions. It was a lie that was invulnerable to criticism. I could become president of the United States and show Bill his own file, and he could simply say in return, “Well, of course you can’t see the real file, Mr. President. You need plausible deniability.”
I turned my head from the television finally and said to Bill, “Can you prove any of this?”
“Ears,” he said. “I have 46 ears under my bed.”
“How can you snipe 46 political figures from hundreds of yards away and then stroll down and cut off their ears, you bald sack of shit?!”
“Are they scattered about, or are they in a case?”
“In a case,” he said, sensing my disbelief, “I’ll bring them in.”
“Please do.”
He never did.
Bill lied about a number of things during his stint as manager, like telling his employees that he had access to any government file on record and that he could look you up and destroy your life if he felt so inclined, so you might want to reconsider taking off next Friday. One day he came in to work hours late and missed an important delivery. He told the owner, Joanne, that he was late because he was—get this-- intercepted by a United States government helicopter the night prior and had to complete a secret mission for them.
She believed him! His job remained secure. My faith in common sense did not.
Unlike little Tom Zlakowski, whose lies aroused pity, and Leroy, whose exaggerations were given with a wink and falsetto laugh, Bill’s perjuries were used as a means of intimidation; a way of bullying others in order to compensate for his own putrid, empty life. What bothered me the most was that people bought it. Everybody bought it.
“Well,” I remember one co-worker saying about Bill’s late night rendezvous with the government, “I’m sure that’s been known to happen, but he said he got dropped off well before sunrise, so I don’t see why he would be late anyhow.”
“You’re missing the point,” I exclaimed, pulling my hair, feeling like I was in a Twilight Zone episode, “The problem is that people are actually entertaining the idea that this happened! It didn’t! He was too hung-over to come in to work on time!”
After speaking to Bill about his “work for the government” that one night, I was simmering in vain for months on end, raising my blood pressure and wearing down my already ground teeth at the very thought of people like Bill. Until, accidentally, I became no better than him.
By the time late fall came around, I was working at Regina Carter Gifts, stocking boxes, the changing of the seasons forcing me to find work outside of the golf course. The Christmas rush was on at Regina Carter, management was in a panicked frenzy, seasonal hires came in to lighten the workload, and I was back in my vitriolic form. A fellow young stocker, Alex, no older than eighteen, had been on staff for only a few days when he saw me punch a large cardboard box full of diabetic slippers. I unleashed my frustration at length, popping as large a hole I could while still moving to pick up another box. I caught Alex’s shocked look on his greasy face, and I wanted to put him at ease. I wanted to tell him that I was simply having a bad day; that I didn’t like my place in life, my non-existent writing career, or my turbulent relationships. Instead, what I said as I brushed passed him, my arms raised defensively, “I’m sorry, it’s just…my baby’s mama…” and kept on walking.
It was a joke. Anyone who’d known me for more than two minutes would know that I was kidding around, only Alex didn’t. He actually believed, in his own youthful naïveté, that there was someone in my life who held the title, “My Baby’s Mama.”
“You have a kid?” he asked me later that night, trying to be understanding. “What’s his name?”
I was going to correct Alex and tell him I was just goofing, but I couldn’t help but think of Little Tom Zlakowski, of Leroy, of Bill, and I saw an opportunity to empathize with the very people for whom I felt so much contempt. It was an opportunity to grow, to mature. My innocuous sarcasm, coupled with Alex’s gullibility, begat the creat
ion of my fictional child,
“Chauncey,” I told Alex. “Chauncey Jenkins.”
I placed Chauncey at the rambunctious age of five. I fashioned him after Calvin from Bill Watterson’s comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes. Similar to Calvin, Chauncey was a bit selfish, to be sure, but also incredibly bright with an impressive vocabulary and a wagon that he rode down steep hills.
“Yeah,” Alex said, “I imagine with a guy like you, your son would have a big vocabulary.”
“Thank you. You would not be erroneous in saying that.”
I found that lying was strangely easy for me. Learning from people like Little Tom, Leroy, and Bill, I sold the idea of Chauncey to Alex through something they all lacked: modesty. I waited for Alex to mention Chauncey first and in doing so, give me the role of the reluctant yet stable father-figure. I may not have been driving through living rooms, wooing rich women out of their savings, or assassinating Panamanian drug lords, but I was giving my life more depth by no longer being just a failing writer whose life was treading water. I was a regular guy. I was a father who was just trying to do right by his son.
After only a couple days, the lies began to layer so easily that Chauncey shellacked the shortcomings of my own life. No, I wasn’t stuck at the same job I had in High-School with the same pay and same night-hours while trying to write a publishable manuscript. I worked these hours in order to spend my days with Little Chaunce-Man while his mother worked (she was no longer a stripper, thank goodness). I didn’t hurt my back lifting a heavy box; Chauncey left one of his roller skates on the hardwood floor yesterday, and I took quite a comical tumble. (Chauncey was a hell of a roller skater, zig-zagging around the kitchen table, doing figure-eights in his playroom, but sometimes I just wish he had the mindset to put away his toys!)
Chauncey existed for two weeks. I came into work one Monday to find that Alex had quit. It was fortunate, for Chauncey’s sake, that Alex was gone. In actuality, I was already growing bored with the little anecdotal lies about my son, and in desperation was about to strike Chauncey with some sort of “-itis.” I was leaning toward bronchitis or perhaps even Acute Pancreatitis, a condition I saw on television one Saturday. I wasn’t going to kill Chauncey (I didn’t have the acting chops for that), but Chauncey was going to spend some time in the hospital. In order to find the exact cause of his discomfort, he’d be poked, pricked, probed, and pained by one Nurse Brownwyn, a bitter old hag with a mole on her forehead and a bedside manner that had turned sour about fifteen years prior.
I imagined myself above Chauncey’s bed while he writhed in pain, and I would yell at the doctor, “Tell me what’s wrong with my son!” But instead of subjecting Chauncey to such traumatic experiences, he simply disappeared.
At first it didn’t bother me. After all, Chauncey never did exist, but Alex’s belief in Chauncey made him real in some sense, and once I began to think of things other than Chauncey, the protective layer my son created was stripped away and my bitterness towards my place in the world were exposed once again. It felt like a withdrawal from a peaceful drug, a drug whose side effects were serenity, happy slices-of-life, and most importantly, selflessness, a characteristic I wasn’t quite ready to obtain through honest means.
Contents
The Horror